This invention relates to a process for pasteurizing and precooking raw (or uncooked) pizza bases. The invention also relates to an arrangement for carrying out this process.
To cook deep-frozen pizzas, the consumer may be presented with two possibilities. The first comprises filling a raw pizza base, freezing the pizza and cooking it before eating. The problem with non-precooked pizzas is that commercially available domestic ovens rarely permit correct, i.e., adequate, cooking of the pizzas because they generally do not enable temperatures high enough for proper cooking of the pizza dough to be reached. On the other hand, because the pizzas are only cooked once, there is no risk of the dough drying out.
To avoid the above-mentioned problem of inadequate cooking, the raw dough is generally precooked at the factory in conventional ovens applying convection and contact heat which has the disadvantage of drying particularly the edges of the dough not covered by filling or sauce. This phenomenon is further aggravated when the pizza is cooked for the second time during final preparation in a domestic oven.